


begin again

by orphan_account



Category: Game of Thrones (TV), Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Space Opera, Crossover, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-13
Updated: 2019-06-13
Packaged: 2020-05-02 13:16:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,873
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19199593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: A girl with hair of fire crash lands on Jakku just before the sun goes down.





	begin again

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sapphfics](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sapphfics/gifts).



> named for **"Begin Again" by Purity Ring**

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A girl with hair of fire crash lands on Jakku just before the sun goes down.

The ship comes through the atmosphere like a comet, but Rey recognizes it as manufactured instead of natural as it hurtles downward: the emerging shape, the debris falling to pockmark the desert.

Rey revs the engine of her speeder and follows the path of smoke the ship left in the sky in its wake. Her eyes track its descent until it disappears behind a steep sand dune. Navigating through the debris field, she is determined not to be beaten to anything that could score her another meal.

It takes longer than Rey anticipated to crest the dune; when she does, the sight is nearly enough to take her breath away: in the valley, a ways down from her position, the wreckage of the ship burns and sparks. Even from a distance she can hear the faint sound of alarms blaring, systems notifying the pilot of failure.

This is the first time she’s even found the wreckage of something so recent. So many times she has arrived after the salvage teams and junkers have already combed every reachable surface of caved-in cargo holds and crumpled hulls, the husks of abandoned bunkers and bombed-out villages left over from skirmishes long since passed.

She is adept at scouring wreckage for things she can sell: it might take days, but she won’t give up. She had never let hap haphazard conditions or unstable infrastructures stop her. Not when she knows there is always, _always_ a way.

Rey stops her speeder a few good strides away from the wreckage. There’s a thrill singing through her, and though she can already smell the smoke and feel the heat on her skin, she trudges ahead, pulling up part of her shirt to cover her mouth and nose. She slides her goggles down her forehead and over her eyes, keeping low to the ground, knowing that a ship so soon after crashing, still functioning but, in reality, dying, will be unpredictable—a real danger, maybe almost real as starvation—until the smoke clears.

Then she sees it: a flicker of movement. Near the gutted cockpit. As twilight descends, her attention is drawn to the ship itself: unfamiliar design, though seemingly older than most skeletal machinery than she was accustomed to; strange creatures embossed on the side, their snouts turned upward, toward Jakku’s bright rising moons—

A voice. Someone is shouting.

Rey grips her staff tightly, slowing her pace but still steadily advancing forward. She is not a stranger to fighting for her livelihood—she did it before, and she will do it again if necessary—and where a fear of the unknown should have been is a kind of yearning, a need to _see_. To know.

Even here, a part of her still dares to wonder.

Peering over the ripped exterior of the hull, Rey catches a glimpse of it: red. _Red_. Like blood.

No: like a sunset.

No: like fire.

Rey’s eyes adjust to the dimming light, taking in the scene:

A girl is strapped in the pilot’s seat of the small, knife-edged craft. With the metal torn from whatever it came into contact with, it looks like an egg hatching, and a girl is coming out. Well, struggling to come out. She kept hitting the release button where straps meet at the center of her chest, but to no avail. A robe, lined with white, or grey, embroidered with the same design of creature as was on her ship; gloved hands working frantically at—

Rey glances over her shoulder. She knows she doesn’t have much time; a decision must be made before other scavengers make their way here.

She steels herself and stands to her full height, vaulting over the warped metal edge in one fluid motion. The movement catches the girl’s attention and causes her to halt in her attempts to break free of her seat. Their eyes meet, and Rey feels it—a snap, a click, a brush, a flutter, like two hands meeting—and something in her is falling down, down, down.

The sight of the girl, rumpled—and beautiful, a word Rey had heard disgraced pilots and junkers use but had never understood herself—takes her breath away.

Rey blinks, coming back to herself, and realizes that the girl with hair on fire is pointing a blaster at her.

“Who are you?” the girl asks, eerily still, her predicament momentarily forgotten.

Rey weighs her options, their possible consequences: to answer or not to answer, to trust or not to trust, to react or retreat—

An explosion from behind rocks the remains of the ship. Rey loses her balance; the girl drops her blaster. By the smell of it, Rey guesses that a fuel line somewhere is leaking. The flames most likely are just reaching it. Which means there isn’t much time left.

Smoke pours in to the little cove of warped metal, and the girl starts coughing. She resumes struggling with her straps, more frantically this time, and Rey moves before she can fully register what she’s doing: in quick succession, she rolls up to the pilot’s seat, tucks her staff under her arm as she pulls out a blade to do away with the straps. Once she cuts through them, she grabs hold of the girl and the two lurch forward, desperately south, stumbling frantically through sand and debris alike until another explosion hits—the one Rey knew was coming: the force of the blast knocks them both down. Ears ringing, she lies facedown for a moment and waits for the paint to come. It doesn’t. She wiggles her fingers and toes, testing to see if she was intact. She is.

Sitting up with a groan, she pulls off her goggles and uncovers her mouth, squinting against the flames wreaking havoc on the wreckage. 

“My ship,” she hears that soft voice say, and startles: she nearly forgot she was there. She turns her head, her disappointment at her chances of salvaging anything worthwhile vanishing forgotten as her eyes settle on the girl. “My ship,” the girl repeats, her voice weighted with disbelief. “How will I…?” She slowly turns her upper body towards Rey, wincing as she does so; Rey would have to guess that, at the very least, there were some ribs that would need wrapping and resetting. It’s a wonder, she thinks, that she survived a crash like that at all. “Thank you,” she says, a bit uncertainly, “for saving me.”

Rey blurts out, “I’ve never seen a ship like that,” before she can think of a better response.

The girl blinks. Glances back towards the wreckage being eaten by flames. “It was my family’s,” she says, and a shadow falls across her face, and the girl, Rey finds, is lovely, even in her sadness, despite it.

The two share a tense, short silence before the girl starts shifting. She hisses, pressing a hand to her side. Yes, Rey thinks, definitely ribs. “I have to be going,” the girl says, though she leans back in the sand, looking decidedly uncomfortable. Her cloak is torn, singed, the smell of something fine and old burning filling the air. Dirt is smeared across her cheek, over her forehead.

Rey nearly forgets herself again.

“Do you have a ship?”

Rey blinks. “What?”

“A ship,” the girl says, her eyes darkening—not with tears, but with what Rey can’t exactly say. “I must return home. My brothers—” she stops abruptly, as if the words were taken right out of her mouth, and tries moving again. Though it obviously pains her to, she manages to shift into a crouch. Rey watches her, more curious than anything now.

“Brothers?” Rey asks, a touch of wonder threading through her voice. No one here, no one she knows, has a family—a proper family; it’s just outlaws and outcasts, bodies on an endless desert that only had one goal in common: survival.

“Dead,” the girl says, and the word hits Rey, cold and hard like a stone. Quietly, the girl says, “I don’t have much time.” She rises, slowly but surely, until she is upright. There is grief on her face, clear as anything. “Well—” she turns her face away briefly. “I don’t know for certain. But they said they were dead. And my sister…”

Rey doesn’t know that kind of grief, that kind of sadness. The pain of not knowing your family was not the same was the pain of your family being taken away, and she can’t even begin to wonder—she doesn’t even know where to start—

Rey scrambles to her feet. Her heart is beating hard and fast in her chest. She says, feeling like something should be pouring out of her, right out of her chest or her stomach or everywhere, “I know where you can get a ship.”

The girl blinks.

“It’s junk, but—it’s all there is.”

The girl visibly brightens, and something in Rey’s heart flutters—does a backflip, completes a series of figure eights, she’s not entirely sure—causing her to smile and nod encouragingly. Anything, anything to keep that unfamiliar sadness away.

The girl asks, “can you take me to it?” at the same time Rey says, “I can show you where it is,” and both girls stare at each other, a moment of silence stretching between them like a horizon until the girl smiles. Some of the sadness is creeping back in, but it’s a smile like a sunrise after an endless night. Like the kind seen on distant moons. “Would you?” she asks, gently, hopefully.

Something inside Rey is positively _singing,_ a live wire.

“Yes,” Rey says, and she fee;s the pull of muscles in her face before she realizes she’s smiling, teeth glinting in the firelight, eyes bright like twin blasters firing.

The girl’s smile fades. “Why?” she asks.

Why? _Why?_ Rey opens her mouth. Words are piling up inside her, unfamiliar and unbidden. A series of options flit through her mind, lightning fast, tinged with the fire-red of the girl’s hair.

What Rey doesn’t say is, “because you are lovely; because you fell from the sky like a star; because you are sad, and there’s nothing worse than carrying around a kind of grief you can’t shed, can’t discard or otherwise remove. Not when it’s about family.” She doesn’t say, “because your smile is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

What Rey does say is, “I want to help.” She offers her hand in greeting. “I’m Rey.”

A quiet moment passes before a small smile plays on the girl’s lips; she takes Rey’s hand. Her grip is gentle, yet firm. “Sansa,” she says, “Sansa Stark, of Winterfell.”

Sansa.

_ Sansa _ .

Rey is smiling so hard her eyes sting. She can’t help it.

Neither girl has let go of the other.

Sansa is still smiling, too.

“I’ll take you,” Rey says, softer than she means to, and begins pulling Sansa in the direction of the promised ship. Away from the fire, their backs to the twin moons high above them. “I’ll take you to it.”

The wreckage is still burning. The sun has gone down.

The stars have finally, finally come out.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
